FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD development:

Sketch­er: 

• hyari­on added sup­port for con­straints with more than three points.
• wwmay­er fixed a crash in Sketch­er (cher­ry-picked by PaddleStroke).
• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed sev­er­al bugs, includ­ing one where a con­tex­tu­al dimen­sion would over­lap with the cur­sor in UI.
• matthi­as­dan­ner fixed a bug and added a sec­ond arc helper to the diam­e­ter con­straint, use­ful if the sec­ond side of the diam­e­ter arrow does­n’t point direct­ly to the arc.
• kadet1090 refac­tored tool hints to remove code repeats.
• FlachyJoe fixed a bug caus­ing neg­a­tive mea­sures on circles.

Part:

• maxwxyz added align­ment to selec­tion for a sin­gle non-pla­nar face selection.
• tomate44 fixed a bug where Part_Offset2D would wrong­ly pro­duce a par­tial offset.
• kadet1090 patched the Attach­er so that the nor­mals would always point out­side of the shape, because with the trans­form dia­log, it was the oth­er way ‘round for some faces.

Assem­bly:

• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed sev­er­al bugs relat­ed to flex­i­ble assem­blies and anoth­er one where uncon­nect­ed joints always touched after a recompute.
• OnesAndZer0s fixed two bugs relat­ed to adding subassemblies.

BIM:

• yorik­van­havre fixed a bug that would result in open­ing sev­er­al Lay­er Man­agers and anoth­er one where Arch_Stairs would not hide its base object upon creation.
• Roy_043 made length, width, and height inputs con­sis­tent with the X, Y, and Z inputs to make them check for in-com­mand short­cuts and select only the numer­i­cal por­tion of the text on focus change.

FEM: NewJok­er added two new prop­er­ties to FEM heat flux load to sup­port an advanced type of radi­a­tion inter­ac­tion: cav­i­ty (sur­face-to-sur­face) radi­a­tion and cav­i­ty name (required to spec­i­fy which heat flux loads form the cav­i­ty). He also added a new Hard Con­tact prop­er­ty that, when enabled, changes the default lin­ear con­tact to hard contact.

GUI: 

• Mis­ter­Mak­erNL updat­ed the dark theme’s tree col­or and tab bar back­ground to improve the UI readability.
• Rexbas nar­rowed down the rea­son why FreeCAD would some­times crash after being idle to an invalid Nav­iCube frame buffer and then (hope­ful­ly) fixed the bug.
• xtemp09 added a Clear Recent Files com­mand to the list of recent files in the menu.
• wwmay­er fixed a crash when delet­ing a binder after delet­ing the binder’s source (cher­ry-picked by 3x380V).

I/O:

• Syres916 added e57 to import file exten­sions. This file for­mat stores 3D point cloud data, images, and asso­ci­at­ed metadata.
• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed a crash that occurred when export­ing a STEP file from a project with an assembly.

Among oth­er changes:

• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed a crash in Part­De­sign on can­celling a sketch with­out select­ing a plane.
• chennes and mosfet80 con­tributed a cou­ple of fix­es to TechDraw.
• jffmichi, dbtayl, chennes, and z0r0 con­tributed sev­er­al fix­es to CAM.
• Roy_043 fixed a hang on snap­ping to large point cloud in Draft.

Addi­tion­al improve­ments and fix­es were con­tributed by Pad­dle­Stroke, theo-vt, pieter­hi­j­ma, Mis­ter­Mak­erNL, luz­paz, ours­land, z0r0, chennes, and mosfet80. 

Please note that main­tain­ers are cur­rent­ly not merg­ing any new fea­tures or improve­ments to CAM. For the weeks to fol­low, only fix­es for regres­sions will be approved. This is because Brad Col­lette is work­ing on a roadmap for the work­bench to help bet­ter plan future devel­op­ment to make it sus­tain­able. Please see this dis­cus­sion page for the rationale.

PR stats: since the pre­vi­ous report, 62 pull requests have been merged, and 37 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: over­all, there are 2938 open issues in the track­er, up by 32 from last week.

Since a few recent patch­es touch the point cloud func­tion­al­i­ty, here is a new video by Tomas Polak explain­ing the basics of using point clouds in FreeCAD:

Else­where in the world, a new add-on is now avail­able that enables load­ing 3D mod­els, curves, and points direct­ly from FreeCAD to RoboDK, a pro­pri­etary appli­ca­tion for sim­u­lat­ing and pro­gram­ming robot arms. Here is a quick demonstration: